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Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:57:46 -0500en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1Press Publish is a weekly conversation with the people building the future of news: journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and more. Produced by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard.Nieman Journalism LabNieman Journalism Labjoshua_benton@harvard.edujoshua_benton@harvard.edu (Nieman Journalism Lab)Press PublishNieman Labhttp://www.niemanlab.org/images/press-publish-2-1400px.jpghttp://www.niemanlab.org
Weekly“The media is in crisis”: Jonah Peretti lays out his vision for a more diversified BuzzFeedhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-media-is-in-crisis-jonah-peretti-lays-out-his-vision-for-a-more-diversified-buzzfeed/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-media-is-in-crisis-jonah-peretti-lays-out-his-vision-for-a-more-diversified-buzzfeed/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 18:48:07 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=152108BuzzFeed, like many media companies, rode the tiger of Facebook growth, and has ended up in its belly. On Wednesday, the company laid out its plans to escape.

In a memo published this morning, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti laid bare some of the business challenges BuzzFeed and other media companies face, and he wasn’t shy about naming the source of the industry’s woes: Google and Facebook. These companies, he wrote, “are taking the vast majority of ad revenue, and paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users.” This power imbalance is at the heart of many of the issues the industry faces today, particularly the race-to-the-bottom dynamic that defines digital content, and the outsize role that filter bubbles have played in political discourse, Peretti argued.

The sentiment is pretty stunning to hear coming from the CEO of a company that owes its much of its success to its ability to ride the algorithmic coat tails of the big platforms. But Peretti’s memo shows that the magnitude of the current duopoly problem has become large enough that it’s hurting even a company as large as BuzzFeed. Peretti’s memo comes a month afterThe Wall Street Journal reported that the company will miss its revenue targets by 15 to 20 percent this year. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are expected to together control 63 percent of U.S. digital-ad spending in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer.

Peretti said that BuzzFeed plans to counter the dominance of Google and Facebook in two primary ways: One is by building a more diverse business model that’s focused less on direct-sold advertising and more on commerce, programmatic advertising, studio development, and revenue from platforms. He said that, by 2019, non-direct-sold revenue will account for over half of BuzzFeed’s overall revenue, up from 25 percent this year.

BuzzFeed Media Brands, which currently includes food site Tasty, health and wellness site Goodful, and home site Nifty, will also be core to the company’s future. For Peretti, the success of Tasty in particular shows that there’s a lot of opportunity in building non-politics, service-oriented lifestyle media brands that bring people together around a shared interest. (While Tasty got nine mentions in Peretti’s memo, “BuzzFeed News” appears just twice, though Peretti’s “nine boxes” diagram suggests that the news operation will continue to be a core part of the business going forward.) This lifestyle- and service-oriented strategy is similar to the one that has led The New York Times, for example, to acquire Wirecutter and launch verticals focused on meditation and running. The idea is catching on.

Remember consumer loyalty to brands? Now brands need to be loyal to consumers. One of the big ideas in this memo. https://t.co/oxgfXVfKbT

The brand strategy, a new one for BuzzFeed, is something of an old one for legacy media companies like Meredith, Time Inc., Condé Nast, and Hearst, which are all built around a stable of established, meaningful news and lifestyle brands. Likewise, having more than one major source of income has always been a core part of healthy businesses in every industry.

Peretti’s conclusion is straightforward: “We’re growing up,” he wrote. The company’s new strategy is in large part a product of larger business realities out of its control, but:

We’ve outgrown the ability to build our business on essentially a single, very distinct revenue stream. We’ve matured into a portfolio of news and entertainment brands that attract very different audiences and can support diverse businesses. We all need to embrace this change, while fiercely protecting and strengthening the experimental, curious, fun and diverse culture that drives our success.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-media-is-in-crisis-jonah-peretti-lays-out-his-vision-for-a-more-diversified-buzzfeed/feed/0Self-help as a publishing strategyhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/self-help-as-a-publishing-strategy/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/self-help-as-a-publishing-strategy/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:53 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151945Engagement projects, interactive journalism, multi-platform storytelling…whatever you want to call it, more media brands will try to deepen their relationship with the consumer in a self-helpy kind of way.

In 2017, The New York Times’ Smarter Living saw further success with its How-To Guides, Mozilla and Tactical Tech rolled out their Data Detox kit, and Axios partnered with Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global for a sleep survey. Other variations included Quartz’s texting app and ABC News’ Dan Harris with his 10% Happier side gig.

In 2018, look for more journalism outlets to attempt to insert themselves into consumers’ lives via daily newsletters, apps, or texts that ask for feedback in the form of stories and/or data.

But engagement producer beware: There is no blueprint for these sorts of projects, because they are built on personality and trust. One size does not fit all. They require building a content feedback loop that requires dedication and resources.

Tim Ferriss and Gretchen Rubin have done this sort of hybrid memoir/journalism for years. They began by tackling their own personal problems (how to be happier? how to work less?) and then using the answers they found to provide their readers with clear, actionable steps.

I’ve found my own success with these projects in large part by enlisting the audience in experimenting with solutions to modern struggles like coping with information overload, changing digital habits, and protecting our online identity.

Two things I’d like to see conquered next: scaling these projects while maintaining the personalized touch they require, and using project results as proof of need/concept to advocate for systemic change.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/self-help-as-a-publishing-strategy/feed/0The end is already herehttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-end-is-already-here/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-end-is-already-here/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:51 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151901Here is how it will go. Men with no fewer than four boats and at least as many divorces, whose monetary interests are best served by going entirely unreported on, will continue to purchase existing media properties, either gutting them, running them into the ground, or rendering them effectively toothless, as we’ve seen with numerous alt-weeklies and newspapers throughout the country in the past few years.

Sometimes we won’t even know whose hand it is pulling the lever on the guillotine. The publications who would’ve reported on who bought the publications won’t exist anymore.

Dailies who aren’t already well ahead of the game in terms of reverting back to subscription models, or of significant enough national prominence, or don’t find their own relatively benevolent billionaire owner, will continue to either be neutered or flattened out by conglomerates into content distributors. The ones that don’t will buy some time, but will ultimately become vanity projects read only by people wealthy enough to remain interested in the superficial comings and goings of other wealthy people.

The internet will continue to become increasingly polarized to the point where we no longer merely dismiss the reporting from the other side that we find inconvenient, but we don’t even realize it exists anymore because they won’t penetrate our microscopically focused self-selected social media cocoons.

The last remaining source of local news will be the neighborhood-based Facebook groups people go to right now to complain about leaf-blowing imbroglios. Instead of asking what night of the week street parking is allowed, we’ll ask if anyone knows whether or not the rumors about the mayor’s horse-fucking dungeon are real, then we’ll be suspended for posting profanity.

With fewer checks on the remorseless, shameless, broke dicks on the local level, the worst people alive will graduate from their local grifting operations to the national stage unmolested by conscience or scandal, populating the halls of power with an even worse species of villain than we’ve previously imagined. Nothing anyone of us can now do will stop it. It’s too late. We’re pivoting and pivoting in a widening gyre.

There’s a trope in dystopian fiction and apocalyptic films where it’s almost worse to have survived for just a little longer than everyone else wiped out in the original disaster. Better to be consumed in the nuclear blast than to live rummaging among the ruins. Those of us still left in the business are the poor survivors. We’ve peered into the cannibals’ cellar.

What’s worse is that we are still pretending it didn’t happen. We’re fighting over pools of shit-water that have settled into the craters and bartering with dog meat under the mistaken impression we’re carrying the fire. On the plus side, there will be a lot more Stranger Things posts.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-end-is-already-here/feed/0The return to nowhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-return-to-now/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-return-to-now/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:46 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151734In the past two years, we witnessed the algorithmically ranked News Feed that Facebook popularized colonize most of the remaining social platforms of influence. (With the exception of Snapchat…for the moment.)

In a sense, our feeds have always been algorithmically ranked; they’ve just been dominated by one variable in particular: time. In a simple reverse chronological feed, the punishment of bad behavior is left to the user — in the form of the unfollow or unfriend. That’s work, and as these platforms scaled beyond early adopters, it’s likely that most new users, rather than doing that work, chose to use the product less. So today, machines do that work for us, and all that’s left for us to do is Like, Comment, or Follow new people.

So now we’re lost in time. Gone from our feeds is the feeling of now-ness that made the real-time web so enthralling for many of us in the early days of the social media boom.

This does not seem to be lost on the major social platforms. “Messaging apps are now bigger than social networks” (though they are also, of course, owned by the social networks). On the back of major improvements in bandwidth, mobile processing power, and mobile battery technology, they are making major investments in Live Everything. Stories have changed the game for Snapchat and Instagram, and they don’t fit neatly into our understanding of “the feed.”

Breakout hits like the trivia app HQ remind us of that feeling of now-ness and community that once was pervasive. Sure, games tend to feel like flashes in the pan, until we look back and realize that embedded in that flash were the embers of some new truth. What can news organizations learn from a shortform live video experience broadcast at the same time every night (as eerily familiar as that sounds)?

Humans crave intimacy and connection, and that intimacy feels somewhat lost in the Age of the Feed — where presence has taken a backseat. In 2018, news organizations that want to stay a step or two ahead of the game might want to focus less on optimizing for a constantly changing set of Feed Rules, and think more about experimenting with Now.

Jake Levine is a venture fellow at betaworks and a former general manager of Digg.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-return-to-now/feed/0Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoinhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/covering-bitcoin-while-owning-bitcoin/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/covering-bitcoin-while-owning-bitcoin/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:39 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=1518312018 will be the year of inadequate bitcoin disclosures.

In April 2013, Farhad Manjoo (then at Slate, now at The New York Times) bought 7.23883 bitcoins for $1,000, explaining that he “wanted to buy bitcoins as pure, shameless speculation.” The speculation didn’t last long: He ended up selling the coins within a month, for a profit of $152. Now, of course, he can make mordant jokes about not holding on to them: as I write this post, those coins would be worth more than $118,000.

As all those journalists know, however, it’s really just as well that they didn’t hold on to their coins. Writing first-person articles about using bitcoin for smallish transactions is one thing; being personally invested in bitcoin to the tune of $100,000 or more is something else entirely. In 2018, as bitcoin futures start being traded on established exchanges, the cryptocurrency is undeniably going to be a multi-billion-dollar asset class, and that’s going to raise some pointed questions in the world of journalism.

Most importantly, the days of bitcoin stunt journalism are over. Today, if you write about bitcoin, you can’t ethically own it, any more than you can own shares directly in companies you write about. Journalists covering this beat should not be directly financially invested in bitcoin going up rather than down, especially not when potential bitcoin profits can end up dwarfing their dollar salaries.

Similarly, when journalists talk to and quote any of the thousands of blockchain experts out there, they should make absolutely clear the degree to which those experts are talking their own book and are getting extremely rich off the current cryptocurrency bubble. If it’s hard for a journalist to be objective about something she’s personally invested in, it’s even harder for an expert to talk about bitcoin’s rise without being affected by the fact that it has made her millions of dollars in profit.

These facts need to be spelled out because they’re not obvious. In most journalism, there has been a workable distinction between principals and analysts; you talk to the latter about the former, for instance by phoning up a university professor to ask about the founder of a unicorn company. In that situation, it’s generally assumed that the founder has become rich, while the academic has no financial stake in the company’s success.

With bitcoin, by contrast, no one really has a clue who owns what. A handful of individuals like to talk very loudly about how they bought bitcoin cheap and then made millions, but a lot of people, more sensibly, like to keep such things relatively private. When those people are interviewed, it’s often impossible to know how invested they are, quite literally, in bitcoin’s ongoing price rise.

And let’s not kid ourselves that all the journalists covering bitcoin have refrained, in a high-minded manner, from acquiring any coins themselves. Quite the opposite: Many of the publications covering the blockchain space are quite deliberately staffed by journalists who have long believed that bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency will transform the world. Insofar as those journalists have now become wealthy through their cryptocurrency holdings, they are going to be more invested in their thesis than ever.

The job of journalism is to enlighten; no one should want to muddy the bitcoin waters even more than they are already. But the web of undisclosed conflicts in the bitcoin world is almost impossible to disentangle, especially since one of the celebrated features of cryptocurrencies is that they can be held secretly. We’ll see more disclosure in 2018 than we have until now. But it won’t be nearly enough.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/covering-bitcoin-while-owning-bitcoin/feed/0A responsible press criticismhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/a-responsible-press-criticism/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/a-responsible-press-criticism/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:35 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151889For all the anxiety it brought, 2017 was a productive year for media and journalism scholars, journalism reviews, “future-of-the-news” experts, and everyone that is, in one way or another, taking part in media criticism writ large. The whole “fake news,” “post-truth” debacle has had at least one merit: bringing media criticism to the forefront, reinvigorating debates about the role of journalism in public life, galvanizing discussions about the failures, errors, glitches, and malfunctions — let’s be honest here, it’s rarely about the triumphs — of media in our democratic life.

As a media scholar, writing on a website that believes it needs to help journalism to figure it all out, I can only rejoice in the fact that our most important conversations are not (only) about the latest technological fads anymore, but about core issues such as media effects, democracy, power, or propaganda. Those questions matter; it’s nice to see them in the spotlight.

There is something unsettling, though, in this sudden renewed popularity of press criticism, as it reshuffles the cards in a weird way. With Donald Trump being one of the loudest megaphones of a certain press criticism — one that relentlessly attacks mainstream media as being corrupt, manipulated and manipulative — we find ourselves in a strange position when it comes to doing what we do, that is, dissecting how the news media works. There’s a fine line between efforts to describe, in realist terms, how the news industry operates (with its ideals never fully satisfied, its shortcomings and shortcuts, its influences and limitations, its ideological underpinnings and its power dynamics) and downright conspiracy theories fueled by populism and anger at the so-called media elites. I know there is a difference between, let’s say, sound political economy scholarship that describes the structure of ownership of commercial mainstream media outlets and angry tweetstorms that denounce the corrupt MSM. But that line is sometimes blurred, in the cacophony of outrage, moral panics and genuine concern that characterizes today’s press criticism.

So 2018 may be the time to figure out how to perform responsible press criticism. Press criticism that can speak to concerns about the role of media in public life, misinformation, and the interplay between media, politics, and business — but also understands that recrimination and denunciation are not enough. Press criticism that does not, however, respond to vicious attacks on press freedom by listening to the siren call of professional protectionism and self-righteousness. In other words, responsible press criticism that would try to hold the press accountable — just like any form of power — while being more than merely adversarial, vitriolic, or admonitory.

How can we achieve that? As it is often the case, we’re not starting with a blank slate. There’s more than a century of press criticism that we could draw inspiration from. One example among others is George Seldes (1890-1995), the famous American investigative journalist, press critic and editor of the weekly newsletter In Fact: An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press from 1940 to 1950. Seldes, a self-proclaimed liberal, lived and worked through troubled times — two world wars, the rise of fascism and Nazism, the Cold War, and McCarthyism. His exposés spared no one: media advertisers and press tycoons, censorship, distortion, and all kinds of attempts to mislead the public, but also Soviet communists, big tobacco companies, the whole American industrial system, and, of course, Nazis and fascists.

It’s not that his outrage was indiscriminate and all-encompassing, but the press criticism that was at the core of In Fact was part of a wider indignation that cannot be separated from issues that run deep into society: politics, social justice, or capitalism. Seldes was not ranting in the comfortable environment of a specialized conversation between media pundits and future-of-the-news experts; he wanted to pick up a fight with everything at the same time, in front of the public.

But the most impressive feat of Seldes’ career and long life is that he never turned into a cynic. He wasn’t criticizing the press out of sterile anger, populism, or the hope of commercial or political gain. He did so out of genuine belief that there’s something to be done about it, and with the old-fashioned certitude that a newspaper can move the world. His hopes about the role of journalism in society were modest, but firm: “to get the facts, and present them as truthfully as human frailty permits.”

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/a-responsible-press-criticism/feed/0Building the ecosystems for collaborationhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/building-the-ecosystems-for-collaboration/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/building-the-ecosystems-for-collaboration/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:30 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151830As an industry reckoning with challenges on multiple fronts, 2018 is the year when news organizations leverage partnerships and collaboration with other news organizations — not to mention a wide range of partners like tech companies, nonprofits, community organizations, and academia — to address challenges.

As a toolset, collaboration is a flexible set of operations that newsrooms can adopt in order to more strategically use limited resources, reduce competitive waste, counter misinformation, ameliorate a lack of diversity, expand reach in audience and sources, connect with communities, cross lines of division, and cover news in community-centered rather than transactional ways.

This is the year when we develop the infrastructure, protocols, and processes to support and facilitate effective collaboration where and when it’s needed, quickly and effectively initiated.

Journalism has much to learn from other industries in this regard. In the same way that the CDC doesn’t wait for an emergency to have a system in place for coordinating area health centers, so too should journalism create protocols for covering large-scale stories, disasters, emergencies, shootings, and other significant events to best leverage the roles and expertise of different relevant news organizations best situated to cover the story.

The coming year will see more organization develop around projects in the vein of Documenting Hate and the Panama and Paradise Papers, where we collectively support and empower networks of local newsrooms to cover large, distributed stories effectively and comprehensively. We’ll leverage infrastructure to make spontaneous collaboration in the face of sudden news more efficient and calibrated. We’ll see more interconnectedness between local newsrooms and community partners, in the spirit of City Bureau, to best reach more cross-sections of communities and provide more nuanced and community-focused journalism.

Whether the scale is global or local, the infrastructure of collaboration, both human and technical, will be both a need and an opportunity. We need to create and foster the relationships that will ensure our newsrooms can address problems that need to be fixed and do the journalism that needs to be done.

This opportunity is our chance to rethink what it looks like to create news in a world where the traditional notions of competition no longer serve the best interests of journalism or our audiences.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/building-the-ecosystems-for-collaboration/feed/0Sharing is caring: The year of the mentorhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/sharing-is-caring-the-year-of-the-mentor/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/sharing-is-caring-the-year-of-the-mentor/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 17:22:21 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151921A few weeks ago, I found myself in a restaurant underneath the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square of Kiev. I was talking to Taras, the impressive founder of a new type of local news organization that seems to be doing everything right. At the center of their strategy, he told me, is audience trust and community engagement. They deliver the right stories at the right time in the right format. Working closely with local businesses, they may have even cracked the revenue model in an exceptionally tough advertising and regulatory market.

What I witnessed in Taras is something I’ve seen time and again throughout 2017: an unparalleled openness. A willingness for people in journalism to connect and honestly share experiences, good and bad, that might further the industry.

With that, I see an opportunity in 2018 to turn the informal sharing we see in conversations like this into something more substantive through mentorships.

The media is under fire like never before. At the same time, this is what the European media innovation ecosystem looks like right now:

Engaged journalism enterprises like De Correspondent, CORRECT!V, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism are making waves internationally.

Startups like Neva Labs, Opinary, Kaleida, Sceenic, and Trint (to name but a few) are ramping up and extending runways with bold ideas and new technology.

Even the traditional publishers and broadcasters are making significant breakthroughs. Just look at Spiegel Online’s award-winning data projects or Euronews’ progress with immersive storytelling.

To help sustain this new landscape, new funding is coming online with the emergence of venture capital hubs like Next Media Accelerator, the continuation of Google’s Digital News Initiative, and increased interest from donors like the Omidyar Network and the Philanthropic Alliance for Solidarity and Democracy in Europe.

In 2018, the experiences of these new initiatives will be the catalyst for even more innovation. Mentorships are essential to accelerate these connections. As an industry, and as individuals, we’re realizing that we need to invest in organizational change, personal growth, and the human connections that will get us there. Mentorships add structure and value to the informal sharing of ideas we experience at conferences and in Slack channels.

Without more structure, all the learning experienced by these various groups will remain siloed (and their monetary investments unfulfilled). Successful entrepreneurs will take vital experience into closed commercial settings. Startups won’t achieve sustainability or exit. Entrepreneurs will fail and quit, newsrooms won’t leverage innovation from within, and students will graduate being unable to find employment.

In 2018, we will see more training programmes, grants, and workshops with knowledge exchange and leadership support at the core. The value of mentorships is already being demonstrated through programs and ideas from our friends at the Knight Foundation, Poynter Institute, ICIJ, Code4Africa, News Integrity Initiative, Google News Lab, Euractiv, Next Journalism Prize, Hamburg Media School, and the Media Lab Bayern. Our own News Impact Academy, Journalism Grants, and Engaged Journalism Accelerator are being calibrated to feature mentorship at the heart of what they do.

We will also see mentorship happen outside of these programs. The best thing about this quiet revolution is that anyone can do it. It starts with an invitation to coffee, a Twitter DM, or a quick question over email. Start with people you know. Connect with people who you can help too, and who will find it a beneficial and rewarding experience. Reach out, explain what you want from the relationship, and take it from there.

Of all the things I’ve done this year, kickstarting my own mentoring relationships, both as mentor and mentee, has been the most rewarding. I’ve visited over 20 countries this year, and from Kiev to Krakow, Berlin to Brussels, and Riga to Rome, the challenges we share unite us. Geopolitics and polarization and advertising markets might vary, but the value in sharing experiences, failures, and victories remains.

Leading any part of an organization in this climate is really hard. If 2018 proves to be anything like 2017, we’re all going to need someone to talk to. If you don’t already have a mentor, 2018 will be the year you get one.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/sharing-is-caring-the-year-of-the-mentor/feed/0Filler killershttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/filler-killers/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/filler-killers/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:55 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=152003Let’s start with the obvious: Times are tough for media these days. Some of that is a course correction after a period of over-inflated valuations and flip-of-the-switch audience building. Some of that is about a shift in human behavior, away from wanting to read in solitude and instead being retrained to like and share and crave likes and shares. It’s unfair (and inaccurate) to say that this was something that was done “to” publishers “by” social media platforms, though, because most of us were complicit in the shift that happened as Facebook and Twitter because meaningful places to distribute content. Most publishers still standing today built (or rebuilt) their businesses through social media — and shifted what “good content” looked like in the process. “Is it sharable” replaced “is it memorable?” and “is it a new idea?” With immediate feedback, easy data capture, and an overabundance of signals to measure, digital media has always been inherently built to trend toward the formulaic. And realizing that people mostly shared just a few simple archetypes of content, we all started to make more content — through the lens of those formulas. Because scaling businesses is about finding cheaper, more efficient, repeatable solutions to the same problems.

But the world is shifting — in some terrifying and disheartening big-picture ways, and in other ways that are smaller and more limited in their impact. Some of those smaller shifts:

So we can imagine a world in just a few more years where there are a lot fewer options by way of “publishers” and “media companies” filling the internet with a mix of highbrow, lowbrow, brilliance, and crap — and pumping out hundreds of different versions of the same stories in the process. There’s of course some danger here (the entire reason antitrust laws exist, really), but that’s another conversation altogether.

But that’s not the only shift on the horizon. The other thing that happens in tandem is that the social platforms are shifting their businesses away from driving eyeballs to the content they needed from publishers a handful of years back — whether that’s a link pointing back to a website from Facebook, a video of an exploding watermelon, or some other viewing experience meant for three seconds of consumption. Reach is down for most publishers already (a cursory look at CrowdTangle will illustrate this clearly), and eventually, we’re all going to break up with Facebook — or at least cool things off a little bit. And as that happens — because we’ll no longer be incentivized to optimize our content production to the 30 to 45 link posts a day plus 10 to 12 videos that might yield the largest number of aggregate visits and views from the News Feed — we’ll stop making lots of short, forgettable blips of filler content. We’ll still tell stories and grow audiences using social platforms, but we’ll do it in a way that puts the user first rather than existing to game the system.

If all of that happens, then suddenly, fewer media companies are left standing — and they’re making less stuff. Meaning there is less of the same mediocre stuff all over the internet.

And if those consolidated players can manage not to lay off too many writers, editors, and creatives in the race to make the next pivot, they’ll be left with a handful of talented, creative people making a handful of interesting, unique things.

In that world, maybe we stop thinking about three seconds of engagement with any piece of storytelling as a success. We start to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We stop spreading accidental half-truths because we don’t have time to fact-check our stories and clearly explain complicated ideas. We showcase the difference between real news and fake news — making fake news easier to spot and making it a little more difficult for loud voices to decry the real thing as fake. We retrain audiences to think critically about what they read and watch. We value the signals that really matter in the long-term rather than the short-term, and we raise the bar for all of the work we do — not just a small fraction of it that’s the “good stuff” or the “investment content.”

That’s definitely the world I want to live in — and the world we’re trying to build over at Girlboss, leaning on audio, experiential, carefully crafted deep dives and thoughtfully reported service pieces over quick hits and aggregation. (You can find a grand total of five new stories on the site on any given day.) So that’s the bet I’m placing for 2018: Less crap on the internet, please.

Neha Gandhi is editor-in-chief and chief operating officer at Girlboss.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/filler-killers/feed/0Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay forhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/newspapers-have-to-be-good-enough-for-readers-to-pay-for/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/newspapers-have-to-be-good-enough-for-readers-to-pay-for/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:54 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151943For newspaper publishers, growing paid digital subscriptions will be their highest priority. The smartest ones will realize that no one is going to pay them for what they can get free elsewhere. So they’ll stop downsizing their newsrooms so that they can publish a sufficient amount of original and relevant journalism that has value for the price charged. Maybe some will even add journalists.

Those still putting digital advertising ahead of paid digital subscriptions are in danger of extinction. The smartest ones will continue to manage down the print business so as to optimize the profitability it can contribute until it is no longer profitable. Hastening its decline would be a mistake.

If they aren’t into data analytics to help problem-solving, they’re behind. If they don’t start utilizing AI, they will get behind. It’s all going to voice, so you better have your ear in the water and be experimenting. The really progressive ones will be studying blockchain to see how it will affect publishing.

Those that have the balance sheet will make strategic acquisitions to add to and accelerate revenue and EBITDA growth. They won’t acquire newspapers, though — that’s just more cost-cutting, not building new business models.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/newspapers-have-to-be-good-enough-for-readers-to-pay-for/feed/0Stop talking trash about young peoplehttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/stop-talking-trash-about-young-people/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/stop-talking-trash-about-young-people/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:54 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=1519361. Insufferable quote notwithstanding, The Athletic is seriously onto something with its fierce focus on a disproportionately valuable section of the traditional news bundle and building a whole new bundle around that. We’ll likely see straightforward adaptations of the model applied to other valuable verticals whose potential readership are susceptible towards subscriptions. Which will be pretty cool, and will go some length toward reviving some parts of the information food chain. But the model will by no means be any comprehensive solution to making up the fundamental losses in the space.

2. Style-guide changes notwithstanding, major media organizations will continue to publish op-eds that devalue, denigrate, and dismiss the value and substance of younger generations. This is, of course, an expression of the editorial power structure that stands up these organizations. After all, very rarely do the youths have a seat at the decision-making table in such places, even if these organizations purport to report on a world that will eventually be inherited by them — though a world that’s nonetheless being systematically dismantled by the generations before them. And perhaps the op-eds and the disrespect will keep coming until the youths are made to age spitefully and angrily until they become the very bitter people who used to write petty trifles about them, and they too will continue to ruin the world. ‘Tis a vicious cycle.

But perhaps one day there will be a major media organization that does not do this. Perhaps there will be a day when the youths will be afforded a proper institutional voice. Perhaps there will come a time where the youths will be treated with dignity, honor, and respect, and the tragedy of their lost futures will be adequately recorded.

Perhaps, then, will we have a marginally better society.

3. Podcast CPM apocalypse notwithstanding, we’re probably going to see minor revolutions in the podcast industry over the next year. Between Apple’s shifting position as steward of the space and what appears to be increased interest from other platforms — ranging from older digital radio types like iHeartRadio to tech platforms like Spotify — it feels like we may well be in the preamble stage of some Godzilla-level ruckus. As with all things media these days, the fate of the space is decided on the platform level. And as with all things media these days, the rest of us have to figure out ways to avoid the falling debris.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/stop-talking-trash-about-young-people/feed/0Moving fake news research out of the labhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/moving-fake-news-research-out-of-the-lab/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/moving-fake-news-research-out-of-the-lab/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:43 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151974We spent much of 2016 and 2017 fretting about the effects of fake news and other forms of viral misinformation. Some did so by proclaiming the advent of a “post-truth” era.

So many of the pixels we dedicated to this topic, however, were uninformed or ill-informed. Not because of any intention to mislead on the part of the authors (usually), but because we are still woefully ignorant of the real effects of fake news and how to fix it.

But there is still so little research that we can apply to everyday fact-checking work. We know quite a lot about the reach of fake news, but not much about its capacity to sway votes or affect decisions. We know at last that fact-checking probablydoesn’tbackfire in experimental settings, but not whether that is true in real life.

2017 saw a lot of new research in this space, to the point where the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is launching a research database to catalog the most interesting academic findings. But it’s still not enough to help practitioners do a better job.

I am hopeful that 2018 will be the year that we move research out the lab and make it directly applicable to journalists debunking falsehoods.

If we want real-world solutions, we need real-world data, however. We need to learn how people actually consume fake news and fact checks when they encounter them in their everyday life, or when they look them up to prove (or disprove) an argument. The IFCN is coordinating fact-checkers to gather information about their audiences and we are eager to work with interested academics.

The biggest prize here, of course, would be data from Facebook. It’s been almost a year to the day since the social network launched a fake-news flagging mechanism, leaning on fact-checking organizations that are signatories of the IFCN code of principles. The platform has released extremely general figures about how this program has performed. I understand that the platform is under enormous pressure to make things work and that there are legions of Facebookers who genuinely care about fixing this problem. But more openness — and a willingness from academics and journalists to criticize constructively and not reflexively — has got to be the way forward.

Facebook has 2 billion monthly users worldwide. It drives around a third of all referrals to top publishers in the United States. And it is performing what is probably the largest real-life experiment on combating misinformation with fact-checking. We need to know how it’s going so that we can make better decisions about what fact-checkers should (and shouldn’t) do.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/moving-fake-news-research-out-of-the-lab/feed/0No, no, nohttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/no-no-no/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/no-no-no/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:34 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151965I like to say “yes” whenever possible. Is there another way to approach something? Can we be creative here? Sure — we can do that story — but let’s make sure it’s crafted for someone we’re not already reaching. No problem — let’s make that work. That makes sense, let’s pursue that partnership.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

But saying “no” is important too. In 2018, journalism organizations will — and must — start saying “no” to things that harm us as people and harm the public’s experience with our work.

No, we won’t hire that person who is talented but a jerk to colleagues, because someone who is talented and kind is eager to take their place. (And no, we won’t keep that person on staff either.)

No, national journalists won’t parachute into local communities and tell their stories to the world without doing our homework, because every time we’re off, trust in the media erodes a little bit more.

No, local journalists won’t tell the stories of people in our own communities like anthropologists, because that makes sure that part of the community knows our work isn’t for them.

No, we won’t allow the continuation of unpaid internship programs, because they often exclude the very people some hiring managers claim they “can’t find” to fill full-time positions.

No. No. No.

And that’s hardly a complete list. 2018 will be a time of great resetting in journalism. Think about the number of major media figures removed in the past few months alone. The staffs of those shows and organizations, suddenly without jobs. The full-scale rethinking of properties built around singular people.

It’s a moment of course-correction at scale — and we can’t afford to falter. The opportunities ahead are dazzling — in decisions big and small.

How many “open secrets” can we expose to make our organizations safer? How many talented, and kind, people can we give jobs to make our workplaces better? How many national/local partnerships can we foster so that the work we produce resonates both locally and nationally? How many neighbors can we get to know so our local journalism is deeper and more meaningful? How many interns can we pay, creating our own pipelines of talent reflecting our country and our communities?

All of us, no matter our role, have the ability to say no to something we know is holding us back.

In 2017, parts of our industry long asleep woke up to some of the insidious consequences of saying “yes” to the status quo too often. In 2018, by saying “no” to the right things, we can make room to say “yes” to awakened opportunities.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/no-no-no/feed/0Passive partnership is in the rearviewhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/passive-partnership-is-in-the-rearview/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/passive-partnership-is-in-the-rearview/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:23 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=152002Want a better partner? Be a better partner.

The conversation used to go:

Boss: Are we on that platform?Employee: Yes! Our feed is up and running.Boss: Awesome, you rule!

Then we arrived at a point where we were everywhere, our feed funneling on overdrive to the far reaches of the web, app, and device world. We watched and waited with great anticipation as we saw spikes in traffic — then the inevitable plateau or, worse, decline.

And then this conversation:

Boss: Why are we on this platform, again?Employee: Well, it used to be great, but now…Boss: What’s our extraction plan?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Today, we live in a reality where stories published to your .com will most likely only be seen by a fraction of the audience you can reach on the Facebooks, Apple Newses, and Snapchats of the world. The conversation is now shifting to finding ways to help your audience not only grow but, more importantly, thrive within dozens of ecosystems you ultimately have no control over.

In 2018, passive partnership is in the rearview.

Instead of jumping onto every new platform, ask yourself: Why should we be here? Can we make it better? Add more value? Be more useful? Can we provide a unique experience? If so, then yes, push ahead.

In the past year, through these partnerships, we began to see the creation of exclusive journalism and bespoke design and storytelling for high-value platforms — that’s the tip of the iceberg. To be change agents, media companies looking to make an impact must take a holistic approach to these relationships.

At its core, it takes a three-pronged commitment that includes delegates from your editorial, product, and engineering teams. Outline to partners what expertise your team brings to the table and how the platform can benefit from a partnership. Make lofty asks, demand more storytelling capabilities, express your desire to rapidly experiment, give tangible feedback — not only on the outward facing but also what’s under the hood (“If your CMS could do this, then we would be able to do X, Y, Z”) — talk UX and UI, and most importantly build candid and respectful relationships.

On the flipside, be open and ask what partners would want from you in an ideal world. (Exclusive stories? Best practices for handling breaking news and alerts?) Schedule standing check-ins to talk about successes and frustrations. Push for road maps and timelines. Express excitement. Become an “alpha partner.” In other words, put in the time.

Of course, you can’t be everything to everyone; some partners just won’t show the love. Those become case-by-case decisions as you try to figure out how to move forward and what your investment (both emotional and tangible) should be. Maybe they just get a 15-story feed.

Historically, these relationships have been a series of peaks and valleys. At the end of the day, we need to find a way to link those peaks and limit the valleys — if only for our own sanity. I believe this is how we can grow together. Otherwise we grow apart…and we all know how that ends.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/passive-partnership-is-in-the-rearview/feed/0The social media apocalypsehttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-social-media-apocalypse/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-social-media-apocalypse/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41:18 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=1519622018 will be the year social media ends.

Bold! But no more foolish, in retrospect, than my 2010 prediction that The New York Times would abandon its paywall after a mere few more months of public outrage and financial pressure. Unlike that dour piece of speculation, this is a prediction I would actually like to see come true. 2017 has been a depressing year. Here’s to hope.

Twitter first. In April 2018, following the release of the Mueller report and Trump’s blanket pardon of not only his entire family but himself, Twitter management will finally suspend @realDonaldTrump. But it’s too late — the political backlash and upheaval from the decision send Twitter’s stock price tumbling. The company finally sells itself to Circa for pennies on the dollar, but the entire userbase and profile information is set on fire by a departing engineer. Circa is left with nothing.

Facebook, surprisingly, ends sooner. Well, not really ends. In February, the company will be forcibly nationalized following more revelations about the extent of Russian hacking and espionage carried out by a clever manipulation of website algorithms. Mark Zuckerberg tries to shut the News Feed down completely, but not before Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz make common cause in the Senate to appropriate Facebook’s liquid assets, its digital data, and its property. Both the GOP and the newly rebranded National Farmer-Labor-Democratic Party have a very different understanding of what it means for “Facebook to serve the state”…but crisis makes for strange bedfellows.

Instagram goes the way of Facebook, its corporate parent. In the space left free by the transformation of the photo-sharing platform, Marissa Mayer tries to revitalize the recently spun-off Flickr. She fails.

Weibo, finally, stakes everything on its forcible acquisition of Bitcoin, but the global energy crisis caused by the 37th hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season in November 2018 blocks Bitcoin from the world’s grid. Bitcoin’s ensuing bankruptcy drags down the Chinese social media behemoth.

In the new world slowly emerging by the end of 2018, people begin to read long 18th-century English novels, go to the symphony, and watch 12 to 14 hours of terrestrial television a day. They also play board games as a family. Columnists for the nation’s “little magazines” reconsider the typewriter, and tell us about it at length. Newspapers begin to regain advertising market share. And, slowly but surely, people begin to know less and less about how many times Donald Trump has golfed, the most recent campus free-speech controversy, and North Korea’s latest missile launch. Everyone grows a little bit more ignorant, but also a lot more relaxed. It’s unclear whether to count 2018’s great social media die-off as a triumph, or a tragedy — or both. Pundits point to the looming 2020 American election as the moment when we’ll finally figure it out.

C.W. Anderson is a professor of media and communication at the University of Leeds.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-social-media-apocalypse/feed/0Obits? As it grows, watchdog nonprofit VTDigger is taking on more of local newspapers’ jobshttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/obits-as-it-grows-watchdog-nonprofit-vtdigger-is-taking-on-more-of-local-newspapers-jobs/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/obits-as-it-grows-watchdog-nonprofit-vtdigger-is-taking-on-more-of-local-newspapers-jobs/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 15:10:08 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151481While testing out podcasts and leaning into obituaries and job postings, the eight-year-old, online-only VTDigger now has a team rivaling the size of the state’s largest newspaper, said VTDigger’s founder Anne Galloway.

“Every time we get two nickels rubbed together, I hire another reporter,” Galloway said.

Galloway built the nonprofit organization after her own layoff from a newsroom and now leads 14 journalists (they’re also hiring for a business reporter) and a business staff of five. In Vermont’s largest city, the Gannett-owned Burlington Free Press lists 16 reporters and editors, in addition to two photographers and a suite of business-side employees. (For comparison, Vermont Public Radio has 17 reporters on staff and the TV stations in Burlington have about the same number of reporters, in addition to photographers and producers. But that’s a different story.) VTDigger is also one of the largest members, both in terms of people and payments, of the LION Publishers, which includes more than 180 local online-only news organizations in 42 states.

“The most important factor in our growth is not just that we’ve been entrepreneurial, but also that we provide a news service,” Galloway said. “Part of the reason people like us is because we’re a daily. We publish eight to 12 stories a day focused on major public policy issues and community reporting, and we interact with the public a lot.”

After powering the site as a $20,000 one-man-band in its early days, in 2011 Galloway joined forces with group of businesspeople forming the Vermont Journalism Trust and eventually also obtained funding from various national and local foundations. She added a salesperson and a business manager that same year, and in 2012 she brought on the first additional reporter to the team, focusing on healthcare and energy. By 2014 Galloway had 12 team members; the next year came VTDigger’s first community reporters, and they’ve been creating bureaus to increase the organization’s statewide presence.

Between 2014 and 2015, the team increased the revenues from $710,000 to just under $1 million thanks to a new donor page on the site and a membership campaign effort with MailChimp, PayPal, direct mail, and popups on the site. They also broke the news of fraud allegations at a ski area in northern Vermont, leading to the Securities Exchange Commission bringing charges against the area’s resort developers. This year alone, VTDigger hired five people (mainly on the business/infrastructure side) and is operating under a $1.5 million budget thanks to memberships, sponsorships and underwriting, and foundational support. Galloway noted that 75 percent of VTDigger’s early budget was provided by foundations, but in 2018 that percentage will be just 10 percent.

In addition, nearly half of next year’s budget will come from reader donations (45 percent), underwriting (40 percent), and about 5 percent from reselling content to 15 other local Vermont outlets. The site is currently in the middle of its second fundraising drive of the year, asking readers to contribute $350,000 by December 31, and had previously raised $250,000 in a drive this spring. For the content-sharing portion, weekly newspapers can pay $40 per week for unlimited reuse of VTDigger content; daily newspapers pay $55 per week.

“We effectively act as an AP for Vermont, and the advantage of that is that we’re able to reach local people who didn’t know about us,” Galloway said. “It’s like a grassroots marketing campaign.”

VTDigger.org now has 200,000 unique visitors per month, in a state with a population of about 625,000.

Another way to reach out to readers has been through podcasts, which started being tested sporadically about a year ago and are now published weekly thanks to one of those new hires: Michael Dougherty, VTDigger’s community editor as of April, leads the organization’s social media and analytics but also spearheads the reporting and production of the weekly podcast, The Deeper Dig. The most popular episodes have just under 1,000 listeners, and Burlington FM radio station WBTV broadcasts the weekly segment.

One series explores the state’s history, with partners Vermont Historical Society and the Vermont Humanities Council, and the second collaboration takes a more intimate look at Vermonters recovering from addictions to opioids. VTDigger is also working with Writers for Recovery to share the poetry of residents overcoming addictions. “We do a lot of coverage on the opioid crisis,” Dougherty said. “This provides the human perspective on addiction.”

Dougherty looks forward to covering the legislative session — VTDigger’s bread and butter — through audio. “During the legislative session, we know that lawmakers are reading our site and citizens are really depending on us to get in-depth with what’s happening in the statehouse,” he said. “Having this kind of audio space carved out every week will give us the opportunity to tell some of the stories in a different way, [including] explainers and putting specific wonky policy details in context for people.”

In a recent reader survey, 25 percent of respondents said they obtain news through podcasts, but only six percent of respondents said they subscribe to The Deeper Dig. “That gives me a sense of how much room there still is to get existing, podcast-ready readers on board with our programs,” Dougherty said.

“We had readers asking for these things. Readers are suggesting that we run obituaries. They no longer read the local newspaper and they need to find obits, so they’ve been asking us repeatedly to run them,” Galloway said. “People are searching for jobs on our site even though we don’t have jobs on our site.”

They’ve already built the wireframe and developed the business plan for the two — funeral homes, flower shops, medical centers, and nonprofits could potentially underwrite the obituary section, Galloway said, and other underwriters have been asking for help with connecting job applicants as well. “We don’t anticipate making a ton of money off of us this, but it will be nicer than Craigslist and less expensive than our competitors,” she added.

“If we can raise $50,000 a year, that’s a job.”

Photo of the Vermont state capitol by Daniel Mennerich used under a Creative Commons license.

In 2018, I predict we’ll all be even more tired. What’s more: I predict our readers are going to get more tired — and that means they’re going to stop responding to this insane, frantic mass of news we’re throwing at them by the minute.

This will have tangible results. Traffic numbers will stop breaking records. Celebrity journalists will lose some of their starpower. And yes, subscriptions and donations will plateau.

When this happens: I predict a round of handwringing from journalists who just can’t understand why people aren’t responding.

I’m not suggesting we stop doing any of this real journalism — I’m saying that we need to prioritize it, clearly and sometimes at the expense of our own egos and pet projects. It’s also fundamental to our job to help tired people figure out which news of the day actually matters. Take a look at your timelines and notification panels: There’s a whole lot more on there than vital, urgent, it’s-your-civic-duty-to-know-this journalism — and most of it’s redundant. We’ve all got social strategies and traffic goals and publishing holes we’re trying to fill, and we know how to write headlines and social copy that oversell what we’ve actually got. The cost comes when people train themselves to ignore us.

There’s an answer: forcing ourselves to ask the question “is this really worth a reader’s time?” What if we chose to ask for our readers’ attention only — and I mean only — when we had something new to say? I’m talking about raising the bar on sending the seventh tweet promoting the same story, commissioning an extra Facebook video that autoplays a point everyone already knows, or pushing the same alert as every other competitor in the market.

I expect that whatever we’d sacrifice in an afternoon of clickthrough rates, we would make up for in an undervalued component of reader trust: mutual respect.

I hope they’re working on UX and UI projects in which news and sports broadcasts go back to the future to better integrate with mobile devices — fewer cameras, simpler angles, more voice, less graphics. Mobile programmers could show live sporting events that are more organically friendly to smartphones — think billiards, not baseball. Realistically, though, most people use their smartphones to watch NFL games (optimized for 80-inch screens), when they need “live” more than “dazzling.” So instead of having to choose between one app for radio-style play-by-play (already global mainstays, especially for golf and tennis) and another for a TV feed, one app could combine the existing streams for the best experience on a smaller screen.

In line with Steven Henn’s prediction of “intelligent, thoughtful radio,” imagine streaming a newscast with a single camera of one person literally reading the news. Or a voiceover could be accompanied by scrolling text (which you could stop in order to read links). The “reader” could occasionally offer prompts for the news consumer to view graphics or images designed especially for smartphones.

Mainstream news is also ready for its Spotify-like transformation. Just as people choose music for different settings — chill workout, hardcore workout, cooking dinner, putting the children to bed — users could tailor the news content they want to hear or read based on mood or situation rather than, say, politics or locale. Weaving in complicated traffic? Just headlines. Need to cocoon from Washington? “Kathleen, here is your news without any political stories. Let us know you’re ready to be fully informed.”

Kathleen McElroy is associate director of the University of Texas School of Journalism.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/building-a-news-video-experience-native-to-mobile/feed/0The year of self-improvementhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-of-self-improvement/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-of-self-improvement/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 12:35:23 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151973Facebook Instant Articles. Facebook video. Facebook Live video. Snapchat Discover. Google AMP. Google Stamp. Messenger bots. Slack bots. Alexa skills. Google Assistant Actions. 2016 and 2017 have been the years of news organizations fitting our content into other companies’ boxes in the quest for The Answer To All Of Our Problems — only to realize that tech giants get bored quickly and have no qualms leaving us holding a dozen additional mini-problems. It’s a vicious cycle, and if Silicon Valley isn’t careful, we’re only going to fall for it another ten or twelve times before doing something about it.

But what will we do instead? 2018 will be the year to look inwards and reflect on the state of our own glass houses. There is going to be a huge opportunity for innovation on the web next year, as Apple will join Google in bringing or improving app-like features such as push notifications, offline browsing, and home screen shortcuts to mobile browsers. Rather than wait for these companies to tell us what to do, we can take the tools they provide and improve coverage on the platforms we own. But before we can do that, we need to make them a place readers actually want to visit: no more full-screen takeover ads, newsletter signup modals, or arbitrary “click to read more” buttons. It will be difficult to overcome our dependence on programmatic ad dollars and pageview counts, but we must.

As the web gains app-like functions, native apps will be reevaluated according to what makes them unique and worth the sizable investment they require. For some, that will mean incredible visual journalism that incorporates AR, VR, and the like. For others, it might mean gathering external signals like commute time or location in order to deliver a truly personal news reading experience. But an app that pairs simple article reading with push notifications won’t cut it any more.

The problem: This all costs a huge amount of time and money. Which will be acceptable for the more well-funded media organizations (though they too will be cutting costs), but unrealistic for smaller, less well-funded ones. This divide between the digital haves and the digital have-nots has been widening for years — maybe 2018 will finally be the year to fix the trickle-down knowledge sharing in tech and come up with open, industry-wide tools that solve our big problems and are easier to set up than a bare repository of source code. It’s in everyone’s interest, because if we want to regain the trust of our readers, fixing one website is not enough. We need to restore their trust in the ecosystems that let us succeed.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-of-self-improvement/feed/0Standing up for us and for each otherhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/standing-up-for-us-and-for-each-other/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/standing-up-for-us-and-for-each-other/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 12:35:19 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151820Despite a devastating blow to journalism post-election, this has been an inspiring opportunity for us to have humility, listen better to our audiences better, and take a stand for our audiences and our work. We, with our audiences, are taking steps towards reversing the normalization of a toxic public discourse. Case in point: #MeToo.

The #MeToo movement has been for me an unexpected, most perfect, and poignant nexus of high-quality journalism and the public discourse, namely on social media. Powerful, compelling investigative reporting culminated in (and worked in tandem with) the shifting of a longstanding public narrative inclined to shame survivors and cover for perpetrators. As an industry, we’ve also been reckoning with the ways in which our own culture has perpetuated misogynistic, abusive behavior.

It’s powerful when journalists and news organizations aren’t afraid to take a stand: reminding the public that we are on their side, and we won’t compromise the truth by refusing to shine a light on our own skeletons. We do it by listening with integrity and vigilantly seeking the truth. We do it by acknowledging that our platforms are tools of power and admit how our very own used them as weapons against the vulnerable.

This is where repairing trust between communities and news organizations begins.

In 2018, I expect news organizations and audiences to remember these lessons and get brave again on how we do our work together:

— We’ll stop using objectivity as an excuse for a weak and lazy narrative and step forcefully into giving voice to those who are perpetually harmed and ignored. We’ll be brutally fair and speak up, especially against bullies. We’ll recognize and uplift courage when we see it.

— We’re going to get smarter about working with social media platforms to get in front of what we do best — telling stories well and truthfully — and know that this is the first step to a long-sustaining relationship with our communities.

— We’ll self-reflect and be confident enough to admit our own mistakes and failings. And we’ll do better.

2018 will be the year journalism gets its swagger again in the face of an anti-media administration and an audience feeling the pain of this toxic public conversation. I still bet on humanity, and I have already seen strong signs of journalism’s role in restoring my faith in humanity this past year.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/standing-up-for-us-and-for-each-other/feed/0Fun with subscription productshttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/fun-with-subscription-products/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/fun-with-subscription-products/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 12:35:05 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=152004Subscriptions are on the mind for every publisher as Facebook and Google continue to cannibalize ad dollars. But while a lot of media companies aren’t new to the concept (hi print), the industry is very early in exploring the different subscription frameworks in a digital world. That will change.

So let’s start with the basics. What is a subscription? At theSkimm, we define a subscription product as:

Habitual: It’s part of someone’s routine. They “need” it.

Recurring: It’s delivered on a regular basis. The user knows what to expect and when to expect it.

Consistent value proposition: Each element and feature aligns with a centralized value statement. A user should be able to clearly say “I find value in this product because I get X every Y.”

Ultimately, a subscription product is something that hits all the points above. Some may be free, some may be premium. At theSkimm, we think of all of our products as subscription — all users are subscribing to a point of view or a value proposition, even if they aren’t paying. Our newsletter is a subscription product — our audience reads it every day in their morning routine to understand what’s happening in the world. Our calendar is a premium subscription — our audience pays to know what’s coming up in the news and zeitgeist every day.

As media moves into uncharted territory, we’ll start to learn lessons from other industries. So let’s break a few down.

1. Volume: This is purely transacting on amount of content. It’s the same product and content, but users pay for more. This is the traditional publisher route — The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. are all heavily based on volume.

2. Content A vs. Content B: This is transacting on an entirely different type of content that is considered to be “premium.” Some examples are YouTube Red or ESPN Insider — the core product is free, but users pay to unlock premium, differentiated content.

3. Features: Users pay to have a better experience or additional features within the same product. This is where most non-media companies are operating: Amazon and two-day shipping, Spotify and offline listening, dating apps and unlimited messaging, and many many more. With all these examples, the core experience is the same, and users are paying to unlock a valuable “must-have” feature. The most common route here for media companies is paying for no ads, but it’ll be interesting to see where else they can play in this space that’s traditionally dominated by tech companies.

4. All or nothing: Pretty simple. Pay or get nothing. Most video streaming services operate here — Netflix, Hulu, etc. It’s risky but can work if you have obvious, upfront value.

5. Superfan: Users pay to get special access to things like events, swag, and behind-the scenes looks, generally transacting on brand loyalty and affinity. We’re seeing more publishers try this route, often as “memberships.”

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and we’re starting to see a lot of companies offer a mix-and-match version of these different models. It’s an exciting time for publishers to rethink their entire value proposition and how that can fit into a subscription model.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/fun-with-subscription-products/feed/0The year journalists become digital security expertshttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-journalists-become-digital-security-experts/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-journalists-become-digital-security-experts/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 12:34:58 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151975The stakes have never been higher: Security breaches routinely make front-page news, and digital security has become a formidable challenge for companies, consumers, politicians, and everyone in between. So far, journalists don’t seem to have been publicly compromised too often. But in 2018, that may change. Stories and confidential sources may be leaked after journalistic institutions are breached. Journalists would be embarrassed, sources would be more cautious, and doing good work would get harder.

All this will become a significant digital security challenge for journalists. To tell stories, they will need to understand the digital security dynamics of the subjects they write about. To preserve their own security, they will need to implement hardened digital security tools and practices in their own work. Digital security will become a core part of the job.

The good news is that digital security has never been easier. For example, hardware security keys provide excellent protection for many common accounts including Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and GitHub. A number of different vendors sell security keys; most cost a few dollars and can be set up in a matter of minutes. Server security has also improved, with a number of cloud providers offering hardened security services.

In 2018, journalists will also think more deeply about the nature of digital security and how digital attackers view the world. Some journalists will emerge as unexpected global experts on practical digital security, rivaling the gurus of the software development community.

By building expertise on digital security, journalists will begin to inform the understanding and decision-making of universities, enterprises, nonprofits, governments, and beyond. Journalists have a unique ability to share their knowledge with the world. When it comes to digital security, that new reservoir of knowledge will change everything.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-journalists-become-digital-security-experts/feed/0The rise of bridge roles in news organizationshttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-rise-of-bridge-roles-in-news-organizations/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-rise-of-bridge-roles-in-news-organizations/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:56:25 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151723With digital transformation, new roles have emerged in the newsroom. Interactive journalists brought developer and designer skills to storytelling. Social media editors, now more frequently referred to as engagement editors, brought the audience into the newsroom. Analytics and data experts, often with titles like growth editors, moved from the marketing department to the newsroom floor, leading audience growth from an editorial perspective. More recently, we’ve seen product managers getting more involved in editorial projects, bridging the gap between engineers and journalists.

These roles have been characterized by the development of new skills, but they have also played an important part in driving cultural change across news organizations.

Traditional roles that used to have clearly defined labels are going to be less and less the norm across the industry. Instead, roles that connect departments and specialties and act as translators — not of languages but of mindsets — will play an ever more important part in companies that are pushing forward their digital development.

These are hybrid roles that are breaking down barriers by working at the intersection of various disciplines. They speak the language of journalism, engineering, and product management. They focus on how to improve collaboration and are part of multi-disciplinary teams. While they may report into one department, they often act as representatives of product in the newsroom or editorial within product.

Across the industry, new interesting job titles emerge every month to further prove this trend. The Washington Post announced in August the creation of three new newsroom management roles: the operations editor, the product editor, and the project editor. A press release explained how these roles are meant to allow the newsroom to partner better with the engineering team; the product editor, for example, “will work hand-in-hand with the engineering and designs teams.”

Similarly, the Financial Times recently appointed Robin Kwong, a former special project editor, to the new position of head of digital delivery. Bringing project management and design thinking into the newsroom, he is charged with “pushing the boundaries of digital storytelling and making imaginative project planning routine across the FT’s editorial operations.”

Others have stressed the importance of working across traditional boundaries. Dmitry Shishkin, digital development editor at the BBC World Service Group, wrote: “I have also learned that the best things happen when people representing different disciplines work together — and BBC News several years ago have set up a unit called BBC News Labs to do exactly that: innovate on the intersection between editorial, data and engineering.”

In 2018, it’s important we start seriously thinking about how these roles — and the people in them — can evolve. These jobs are not easily categorized and are difficult to explain not only during a dinner party or in conversations with our parents — even colleagues battle to grasp their peculiarities.

Many of these positions are currently the product of the personal development of those who are shaping them every day, reflecting a unique combination of experiences and opportunities. One is rarely similar to another. What they have in common is that they’re often placed in cross-functional teams and have a bridging component. Their importance is that they are agents of change.

When you are creating a new role (and many of these are created by those who end up in them), it’s difficult to know where you are going and what you’re measuring yourself against. Newsrooms need to start thinking about establishing a real career path for their bridgers: What will happen when they leave? Will any one person be able to replace them, or are the roles too tailored to an individual? What kind of frameworks can be put in place?

In digital transformation, the transition never stops and the learning curve is constantly evolving. If change is the new norm and these roles will be key to that change, it’s important that we start to raise awareness around their challenges and empower them to keep pushing innovation forward now.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-rise-of-bridge-roles-in-news-organizations/feed/0VR reaches the next levelhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/vr-reaches-the-next-level/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/vr-reaches-the-next-level/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:55:33 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151722Technology in the coming year will be overwhelming, if not scary. But if you aren’t planning to embrace the challenges, then you’re missing an opportunity to learn and connect with new audiences. So as not to overwhelm you with a laundry list of relevant tech, let’s focus on a handful I expect will disrupt our industry in 2018.

In the new year, people will get real about virtual reality. Audience adoption will grow considerably as lower-cost headsets enter the market, but so will their expectations of what true VR is. We’ll begin to see a slow shift from dedicated monoscopic 360° video pieces in exchange for high-production-value interactive experiences. These changes will drive the demand to produce high-quality content, which will be difficult to achieve, so you’ll see fewer organizations supporting the platform. Organizations that do continue to support the development of virtual reality projects will create some of the best narrative-driven experiences we’ve ever seen.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention augmented reality. This emerging platform is quickly catching up to virtual reality, but don’t expect AR to be a mainstream platform in 2018. We’ll begin to see more AR applications, but most will be limited to 3D objects appearing above a surface when a user points their phone’s camera at a printed image — I call this smoke and mirrors, as that tech has been available for years. With native integration of AR functionality into mobile devices (ARKit and ARCore), you should start seeing the breadcrumbs of the platform’s future with the introduction of goofy looking AR-enabled eyewear later in the year.

I expect someone reading this will be the first in our industry to develop a functioning AR news platform built for the new glasses. The user experience and functionality will be clunky, but the prototype will drastically change the way we think about media consumption and location-based personalization beyond the screen of a mobile phone.

In an effort to support the expanded development needs of virtual and augmented reality experiences, you’ll begin to see the creation of dedicated teams that closely resemble that of videogame development studios. These teams will be made up of a diverse group of journalists, designers, and developers. A new audience will begin to take notice as these development teams push the boundaries of interactive storytelling. It will be a challenge, but organizations that have been dedicated to supporting immersive technologies will reach a new and more connected audience.

Accessing media will be easier than ever before, thanks to visual discovery applications powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. These technologies will allow users to surface content through text, image, and facial recognition by simply aiming their phone’s camera at a point-of-interest. Relevant content will be surfaced providing the user an opportunity to explore and discover stories within their communities.

2018 is the year we all need to stop making excuses and jump head first into the unknown. We must embrace these technologies and understand the future of media will not be driven by what we’re already comfortable with. Take risks and trust your teams; their passion is infectious. Expect a few failures, but if you emerge without a few scrapes, then you’re doing it all wrong.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/vr-reaches-the-next-level/feed/0The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platformshttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-snapchat-scenario-and-the-risk-of-more-closed-platforms/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-snapchat-scenario-and-the-risk-of-more-closed-platforms/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:55:29 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151719I fear 2018 will be the year we will see a major platform decide that news is simply not worth the trouble and move to (1) reduce the role of news and systematically separate it from other content and (2) reduce the number of news organizations allowed to publish to the platform, strictly controlling who has the opportunity.

We can call this the “Snapchat scenario,” as that is basically how news works on Snapchat. Some platforms in mainland China, Japan, and South Korea also control news distribution tightly and are only open to preapproved select partners.

Relatively open platforms like Facebook or YouTube could choose to adopt this model, for any mix of three possible reasons rooted in politics, users, or advertising—

News and news-related content is at the heart of much of the political and public scrutiny faced by platform companies in Europe, the U.S., and beyond. Having a lot less of it, more clearly separated from other content, and more strictly controlled, might be seen as a way to reduce that pressure.

News and news-related content is clearly a part of the wide variety of things that platforms offer, but it is not clear how important it is to users. Surveys suggest that only 1/3 of YouTube users say they get news on the platform, and while that figure is 2/3 for Facebook users, a majority of those who get news on Facebook say they see news incidentally, while using the platform for other, for them more important, purposes.

For those who see the relationship between platforms and publishers as a zero-sum game, having a platform like Facebook or YouTube stepping away from news might seem like a win.

It would almost certainly be a win for the “platform darlings” who would be allowed to continue to publish to the platform. (Past experience suggests these select partners would be (a) few, (b) primarily English-language brands with international reach, and (c) mostly but not exclusively up-market.)

The reason the Snapchat scenario worries me is that — while it is clear that major platforms like Facebook and YouTube have been misused to spread disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech, both by for-profit actors and political actors, and have to confront serious issues concerning the quality, intelligibility, and algorithmic filtering of content — they also have some very real positive implications that might well be imperiled if news content was much more restricted. They include:

The demonstrably positive effects of the largest platforms in terms of exposing people to more sources of news and more diverse sources of news than they would otherwise see (especially for young people and those least interested in news).

The way in which they have enabled some political movements — whether progressive or conservative, moderate or radical — to reach millions of people online. In October, Facebook said that more than 45 percent of people in the U.S. are friends with someone who has posted a “me too” status.

It is clear that large platforms like Facebook and YouTube have system-wide implications in terms of their dominant role in drawing attention, collecting data, and attracting advertising, and that, by enabling lots of different actors and activities, they have also become platforms for many troubling things and have sometimes failed to check these.

But these relatively permissive and often rambunctious environments also have demonstrably positive implications for our democracies. It is not inherently wrong that Snapchat and some other platforms take a far more restrictive approach to news. But do we want the biggest platforms to do the same?

Most platforms would want to continue to let their users “organically” share things they are interested in. But the example of Snapchat — and many increasingly popular messaging apps — suggest they can simultaneously decide to design their products in ways that limit both the role of news overall and news organizations’ ability to freely publish to the platform.

This is the Snapchat-scenario future we may face, but in my view not one we should aspire to. A central challenge going forward is how the positive effects outlined can be retained while also confronting some of the very real problems associated with the rise of platforms. How do we, as societies, deal with this? Paraphrasing James Madison’s stance on the rambunctious and often wildly inaccurate and partisan press of the early American republic, we might say that some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of everything, and in no instance is this more true than in that of open platforms. I hope efforts to combat such abuse won’t involve systematically reducing and restricting the role of news.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-snapchat-scenario-and-the-risk-of-more-closed-platforms/feed/0The year local media gets conservativehttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-local-media-gets-conservative/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-local-media-gets-conservative/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:55:26 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=1517332018 will be the year that every media market in the country gets its own Fox News-style voice at the local level.

The FCC looks set to approve Sinclair Broadcast Group’s nearly $4 billion takeover of Tribune Media, ensuring that Sinclair’s reliably conservative take on the news will soon reach 70 percent of households through TV affiliates. Not coincidentally, this will also be the breakout year for former Trump surrogate Boris Epshteyn, whose scorching commentaries in the president’s defense Sinclair stations are required to air multiple times a week.

Meanwhile, conservative tycoons with less money to spend on their hobbies will recognize that a number of local papers are primed to be purchased on the cheap. This has already happened at LA Weekly, which was taken over late in 2017 by a shadowy conservative group of investors out of Orange County.

Armstrong Williams, the Ben Carson confidante who proved his commitment to journalistic standards back in the aughts by taking money to promote Bush administration policy pushes in his column, expressed an interest in buying Washington City Paper. Williams’s editorial ideas, according to The Washington Post, included soft-focus profiles of Hope Hicks’s hobbies and Steve Bannon’s charitable work.

Williams eventually dropped his bid, but there are plenty of other distressed papers around the country that can be purchased at rock-bottom rates. As local papers continue to struggle, expect GOP donors with money to burn to follow Williams’s lead.

Other predictions:

— The media infrastructure pushing hoaxes and conspiracy theories will only continue to grow, with increasingly dangerous effects offline.

— New technology will make it much easier to convincingly doctor video, leading to a high-profile reporting disaster after an outlet reports on faked video. Enterprising youth in a former Soviet bloc country will master the art of doctoring “real” news video, further shaking the foundations of objective truth and giving Macedonian teens a break from the discourse.

— This one is more of a wish than a prediction, but I hope 2018 is the year that media prognosticators stop hoping that “media literacy” programs will educate away the problem of people falling for obvious hoaxes in their news.

Anyone who would actually seek out media literacy training doesn’t need it, and Republican legislators would never allow a school curriculum that advised against trusting, say, Infowars.

Until then, calls for media literacy education will remain a comforting idea that journalists tell themselves to avoid confronting ugly facts about their industry and country.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-local-media-gets-conservative/feed/0Social and media will splithttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/social-and-media-will-split/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/social-and-media-will-split/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:55:23 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151726Broadcast-focused, open social networks revolutionized the way we connect with people online. First-wave social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram ushered in a golden era of social media and allowed people to build audiences and have their voice heard by millions.

But in 2017, the novelty of racking up a million followers on Instagram or seeing what your third-grade crush is up to on Facebook has washed away. Tweeting out your opinions only to be shouted down by Nazis has caused many users to abandon posting on open social networks and instead spend more time in closed networks and group chats.

This means less time scrolling through your Facebook or Instagram feed and more time posting in Facebook Groups or connecting with friends via Messenger. It means abandoning the quest to respond to every confused man on Twitter and instead DMing with groups of people who matter. It means maintaining several small, interest-based Instagram accounts or Finstas, rather than a single, public-facing persona.

As users migrate to these closed systems, they’re also shifting away from the type of broad-based algorithmic feeds packed with news and media content that were the hallmark of first-generation social media. This isn’t to say that people are consuming less media; they aren’t. However, I predict that media consumption will become a more separate, intentional behavior.

In 2018, publishers will have to find their footing and adopt new distribution strategies to take advantage of this shift in user behavior. This doesn’t mean investing in another incredibly frustrating Facebook Messenger bot that exactly four people will use, or trying to awkwardly insert your brand into personal conversations between friends.

It does mean producing the type of premium content users will subscribe to and seek out. It means spending less time trying to reach the widest audience on the web and more time building intentional, dedicated audiences. It also, unfortunately, means developing closer relationships with social platforms that still control the means of distribution via media portals like Facebook Watch or Snapchat Discover.

Just as the first wave of social media upended previous consumption habits and allowed a whole new generation of media brands to launch and flourish, group messaging and social 2.0 will provide exciting new opportunities for publishers and news brands — even if we’re all still at the mercy of Facebook.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/social-and-media-will-split/feed/0Better design helps differentiate opinion and newshttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/better-design-helps-differentiate-opinion-and-news/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/better-design-helps-differentiate-opinion-and-news/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:55:13 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151721No marketing slogan will make readers believe that journalism is unbiased, accurate, and real until we get serious about helping them navigate our different types of coverage. 2018 may not be the year we solve the opinion vs. news challenge, but it will be the year we will take it seriously and dedicate resources to remedying it.

Before the internet, the opinion section was just that: its own section. We used changes in print design to signal to readers that this content was different: ragged-right alignment, italicized headlines, columnist headshots. These standards were okay because they were in the context of being on a separate page clearly labeled as opinion.

Most readers today find our stories by directly visiting article pages, not by navigating to a specific section front. They see articles posted on social media or shared by friends via email or messaging apps. It needs to be immediately obvious to the reader whether that content is news or opinion, and that’s something the industry is sorely failing at.

The Wall Street Journal has a section called Review, where we invite people to share their ideas, but it’s not clearly marked as opinion, and you don’t know the author doesn’t work for the Journal until the very end. The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, doesn’t have any labeling at all on their opinion pieces.

More news organizations are adding “Opinion” to headlines and social media share messaging. That’s a good start, and it can be especially useful if you are working within the constraints of your content management system.

But too often, the standard solution is to throw a label on the top of the story and feel good that we’ve done our part. The implication is that if the reader misunderstands, it’s their fault. Our readers aren’t stupid and deserve far more respect than we’ve been giving them.

Labels aren’t helpful when we have a slew of terms we use whose meanings are misunderstood frequently: columns, analysis, editorial, opinion, commentary, essay, viewpoint, perspective. These terms represent less of a black-and-white situation and more of a spectrum of reported news to first-person opinion. It’s no wonder readers are commonly confused and aren’t sure if they can trust what they read.

This is a design challenge. Throwing a small label on an article page busy with annoying ads, popups asking you to sign up for a newsletter, and breaking-news banners isn’t sufficient. It’s our job to solve it in a meaningful way that goes beyond tweetstorms that don’t reach all of our readers. Many news organizations are still using labels that denote the section the piece belongs to, but it’s more useful to readers to denote news vs. opinion rather than entertainment or science — especially if the section name means more to the journalists than it does the readers.

There have been positive strides in this initiative. The Washington Post labels stories that aren’t news. I like this approach rather than labeling all stories because it makes the non-news stories stand out and provides much-needed white space.

Mic takes it a step further and explains what their terms mean on the article page.

News organizations must take this challenge seriously and work with design and product teams to establish guidelines that help differentiate content. Here are the questions we should think about in 2018:

What terms do we use across our site to denote non-news stories?

Are these terms consistently used across the organization?

Do our readers know what these terms mean?

How will we communicate to readers what these terms mean to us?

What labeling can we use to let readers know if this story is news or opinion?

How can we implement better design to make it more obvious when we have opinion content?

We must also think of this as an industry-wide problem. The Duke Reporters’ Lab’s research found inconsistent terminology across news organizations trying to distinguish opinion content. Our readers aren’t just reading content from our site, and we need to make it easier for them to understand this concept across their entire news diet. A shared vocabulary would be a good place to start.

Note: Thanks for Brittany Shammas and Jessica Lipscomb for editing.

Rachel Schallom works on newsroom transformation and digital strategy at The Wall Street Journal.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/better-design-helps-differentiate-opinion-and-news/feed/0The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attentionhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-platforms-power-demands-more-reporters-attention/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-platforms-power-demands-more-reporters-attention/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:55:09 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151724The relationship between publishers of news and the digital platforms (especially Facebook and Google) has been fraught for almost a decade. The platforms, leveraging their sheer scale, have seized ever-greater shares of digital advertising revenue and contributed mightily to the collapse of advertising prices by stimulating the supply of advertising opportunities at a rate faster than the demand for it could ever grow. At the same time, the platforms have also driven huge amounts of traffic to the publishers — accentuating the paradox of growing audiences accompanied by falling profits.

All of this may well approach a crisis point in the year ahead. The crisis, if there is one building, began with the revelations, just after the election, of how the platforms, and especially Facebook, had been employed by the Russian government and the Trump campaign, possibly in collusion, to disseminate what has come to be called “fake news.” But the problem goes beyond that.

It is increasingly clear that the operation of the platforms, both from an antitrust perspective and even more importantly from the perspective of democratic governance, has received remarkably little scrutiny. And it seems unfortunately also true that their executives, particularly at Facebook, feel very little impulse for accountability until confronted publicly.

This all puts enormous pressure on journalists to do their job in holding these enormous enterprises to the standards of decency, legality, and democratic practice that we are all entitled to expect of the nation’s most profitable companies. Some work of this sort isbeingdone. We need more. Journalists would do well to recognize the commercial impulses limiting such inquiries — and not to let that deter them. For the sake of all of us, moreover, they need to do this work before it is too late.

]]>http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-platforms-power-demands-more-reporters-attention/feed/0Women come backhttp://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/women-come-back/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/women-come-back/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:54:57 +0000http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151757For the past few years, I’ve had the good fortune of being invited to make predictions about what’s to come in the new year for journalism by the kind folks at Nieman Lab.

Thus far, I’ve been a lousy fortune teller. My predictions rarely pan out. They are presented more as wishful thinking. My crystal ball appears to be out of tune.

And they did. In 2017, women fought back. They fought back against sexism in the workplace, in politics, in everyday life. The #metoo movement is only the latest iteration of female indignation. I have been watching, along with everyone, as women step up and step out to claim social injustice, in the realms of entertainment, politics, and the workplace.

I think about due process, but I also cannot help thinking that due process, as practiced in the U.S., typically contains a socio-cultural bias that inevitably privileges men and makes it easy to delegitimatize claims brought forth by women. It is because of the flaws in how due process is applied that women have been silent for so long. Amplified by the social dynamics of the #metoo hashtag, the collective voice of women gets louder. It drowns out the noise that in the past questioned these claims of harassment and mistreatment, muting them out.

What will come out of the #metoo movement? I don’t know for sure. Some cultural shift, I would hope, that goes beyond superficial acknowledgments of injustice.

But here’s what happened as the voice #metoo grew and reverberated throughout the infoscape: I started to see women journalists again. I didn’t notice them at first, because I had gotten used to a news environment filled with manels (male panels) populated every once in a while with the token female: not too aggressive, not too provocative, not too opinionated, not too ethnic but ethnic enough to fill certain quotas, never as chatty as the male panelists, and frequently interrupted.

But there they have been, for the past few weeks or so. Women. Several younger. Intelligent. Articulate. Funny. Sharp. Informed. Women it was a pleasure to listen to. Some reporters. Some journalists. Analysts and commentators. And several politicians. Female politicians, new faces. And then it hit me. Where have these women been all this time? Did it take the discrediting of male behemoths of journalism and politics to get them to come to the forefront?

I am tired of seeing the same old faces dominate news and politics. I want to hear and see young, sensitized, informed, and clever people, from all perspectives and backgrounds, populate my infoscape. And especially, I want to hear what young intelligent women sound like. I want them to have the opportunity to shine. We don’t get many opportunities, and we get even fewer opportunities to make mistakes. I want these women to have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.

So here’s to 2018 marking a female comeback in journalism. I hope this time I get it right.

Zizi Papacharissi is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.